Borrowed from renowned philosopher Immanuel Kant, Negative Pleasure is and experience
of the sublime. The sublime feeling is a kind of constant shift between the fears of the overwhelming and the odd pleasure of seeing that “overwhelming overwhelmed”. One of the first articulations of the theory of sublime can be found in Kant’s book Observations
on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, “The various feelings of enjoyment or of displeasure rest not much upon the nature of the external things that arouse them as upon each person’s own disposition to be moved by these to pleasure and pain.”

1989 Born in Marmaris, Turkey. Lives and works in Maryland, U.S.A. Illustrating for numerous magazines and children’s books, Meltem graduated with a MFA degree in Illustration at MICA (Maryland Institute Collage of Art).

“The form is inextricably linked to a partner, which is also universal: the force. Without it, the shape would not exist, yet it struggles to destroy it relentlessly. This dialectical couple, integral with the couple formed by Time and Space, continues its conflict from the matter to the art, from the atom to Rembrandt. ”
René Huyghe, forms and forces, 1971.

T H E P I L L is pleased to announce Marion Verboom’s first solo show in Turkey.
Gesh, is an imaginary Sumerian time measurement taken from Don Delillo’s novel Ratner’s Star (1976), where Billy, a young mathematician prodigy manages to arrive to a secret location to decipher a message allegedly coming from outer space. In Delillo’s novel, the young boy uses this Time reference to make his journey feel four times faster than terrestrial time.
The cycles of iconographic appearance and disappearance are distinctive in the history of Turkey, from the Byzantine era to the present day, which saw iconoclastics and iconodules, Christians and Muslims battle on the battlefield of images.
For her first exhibition in Turkey, Marion Verboom has investigated Istanbul’s Archeology Museum’s archives in order to render the evolution of form in the Anatolian peninsula.
The exhibition will feature, among a series of works on paper, two types of sculptural works, which will construct a spatial dialectic: on one hand columns called Achronies will associate forms and material by stacking elements around a vertical axis, on the other hand, flat folded sculptures that refer to horizontality.
A text by curator and art critic Anissa Touati will be accompanying the exhibition along with scientific contributions of Tate Britain’s Nigel Tallis, curator of the British Museum’s collection of Assyrian and Babylonian artefacts and Luc Bachelot, archeologist and researcher in CNRS in the laboratory “History and archeology of cuneiform Orient”.
“It is a commonplace that to uncover the past as archaeologists we have to dig. The foundation of archaeological interpretation is in deriving a sequence and constructing a narrative from stratigraphy. What is first? What comes later, what is disturbed? Like ice cores, or geological samples or a disturbed stratigraphy from an archaeological site. Verboom’s work is immediately both recognisable but subtly awry. Here, the Hittite lion seems fragmentary and inert, but look more closely and its claws are long and sharp: this is a living, not a dead history. As we struggle to compose a narrative from these clues we realise that we are the archaeology, and in querying our responses, we become the discovery. Such modern works with direct archaeological context force us to reassess what we we think we know, and to look more closely at our fondly classified fragments of the past, as modern and ancient elides more sharply into the study of what we are.”
Nigel Tallis
Curator - British Museum¹s collection of Assyrian and Babylonian artefacts.

Bilge Friedlaender's solo exhibition at Arter will feature a body of work from the artist's fecund years of production between 1975 and 1985. Most of the works in the exhibition remained unseen since 1977. As the first solo presentation of Friedlaender's oeuvre since her passing in 2000, this exhibition will present rigorous examples of her most analytical works. Finding “time, repetition, and the numerical mystery structure of things” as the focal point to explore, Friedlaender used paper, string, and natural materials to engage the line and square as expressions of the basis of human-ness.

Nil Yalter's solo exhibition at Arter will comprise of works realised by the artist in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly bearing witness to stories, living conditions, and struggles of marginalised people. Concepts of space, body, memory, and immigration will be explored through a variety of media including drawing, painting, photography, video, computer programming and performance.

The same days also host another exhibition at Borusan Contemporary, Perili Köşk. Curated by Dr. Necmi Sönmez, “Script” reads into the new acquisitions of Borusan Contemporary Art Collection through the poetry of İlhan Berk, suggesting a special interpretation. The exhibition will be open to visitors on the office floors and areas excluding the temporary exhibition spaces.

The collection exhibitions that were previously inspired by authors such as Leyla Erbil and Tezer Özlü are now succeeding the series with İlhan Berk (1918–2008), who brought a breath of fresh air to Turkish poetry. The starting point of the exhibition is Berk’s poem titled “Script,” as well as his being a poet who paints. Videos, photographs, light sculptures and installations in Borusan Contemporary Art Collection will be construed through İlhan Berk’s poetry, along with ten different prints of the poet himself, and his handwritings.

Areas that are based on the act of “writing” such as handwriting, letter, lithography constituted the backbone of İlhan Berk’s poetics. All his life he followed the footsteps of himself by keeping diaries and journals, and developed his paintings and prints around the same theme.

Within the context of contemporary art, especially an inclination towards the studies on writing, documenting, and archiving demonstrate the differences in viewpoints of the artists. “Script” will bring together masterful poet Berk’s world of poetry and painting with the pursuits of contemporary art and open an unusual contextualization process to discussion.

Poetry reading and panel events that will be held parallel to the “Script” exhibition will enable different interpretations between poetry and contemporary art.

Flight examines the notion of air from both poetic and practical views. It is an animated data-driven application that renders a real-time vision of what populates the proximate airspace. The real (airplanes landing and taking off, birds, satellites, clouds, rain, wind) meets data not necessarily credible, such as UFOs.
The current data landscape for Flight detects data proximity to the following airports: Istanbul (IST), London Heathrow (LHR), Los Angeles (LAX), and New York (JFK). By building a database using real-time data from FlightAware, eBird, weather.com, as well as local sensors, news sources and censuses, Flight reflects on the complex skies above our heads.
The ecologically inclusive approach of Flight continues the work in Zurkow’s Mesocosm series, also in the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, where animated, specific landscapes slowly unfold, blending the “natural” and the anthropogenic, natural science and fantasy via a slow, algorithmic trajectory. Flight currently runs on Open Frameworks as a site-specific installation.

Curator: Haşim Nur Gürel
Exhibition Opening: Monday October 31, 2016 at 6:30pm
On display from November 1st to Saturday 4th of February, 2017

Rahmi Aksungur is a highly influential sculptor and academician whose body of work has made a significant contribution to contemporary sculpture in Turkey. The Elgiz Museum is pleased to present Rahmi Aksungur’s latest exhibition EU 48/6/N on display in the temporary exhibition space from Tuesday November 1st to Saturday February 4th, 2017. The exhibition features two previously unseen works and 14 on loan from various private collections including the Elgiz, Yıldız Holding, Mustafa Balcı, Cağla Cabaoğlu, Haydar Halit Cenkeri, Kemal Servi and Cengiz Akıncı.

Rahmi Aksungur often draws inspiration for his artworks from the objects of daily life. Thus, In EU 48/6/N, we find the organic; some peppers, an apple, a leaf and a very large fish juxtaposed among Aksungur’s abstract and figurative sculptures.

In an recent interview with writer Jonathan Bastable, Aksungur was asked why he had decided to create a fish, Aksungur replied that he likes to eat fish and ‘there’s is no concept behind it’. Aksungur says he feels that art has become overworked by intellectual approaches such as those found in conceptual art.

Aksungur habitually alters the scale of his subjects forcing the spectator to reconsider his or her spatial experience, relationship and understanding of the objects presented. For this reason the idea of mass is an ongoing consideration in Aksungur’s work. Bastable made an astute observation and said that ‘when you stand in front of a sculpture that is the size of a huge rock, it is like looking at the thing in extreme close-up, or like staring at it through binoculars, the gigantism focuses and concentrates your attention’. Bastable believes that when Aksungur’s pieces are displayed on a pedestal they become imbued with alternates meaning which are different from our habitual understanding. Bastable says of Aksungur’s works that they ‘become in effect a monument, a statue of a fruit or of a fish. And a statue exists to proclaim the importance of its subject’.